VMNH was visited by fly researcher Bill Murphy of Indianapolis, Indiana. Our curator of recent invertebrates, Dr. Kal Ivanov, hosted Bill and gave him access to the collection of hundreds of thousands of pinned insect specimens. Bill dove right into the fly collection (in our Latin classification system, flies are “Diptera” which literally translates to two-winged – flies are the only insects that support only one pair of wings).

Dr. Bernard Means, VMNH Research Associate and Director of the VCU Virtual Curation Laboratory, recently traveled to India to HNB Garhwal University in Sinagar (Garhwal), Uttarakhand State, India to further discussions of 3D artifact scanning and strengthen the relationship between the Virtual Curation Laboratory (VCL) and Dr. Vinod Nautiyal and his students.

Dr. Bernard Means, VMNH Research Associate and Director of the VCU Virtual Curation Laboratory, recently traveled to India to HNB Garhwal University in Sinagar (Garhwal), Uttarakhand State, India to further discussions of 3D artifact scanning and strengthen the relationship between the Virtual Curation Laboratory (VCL) and Dr. Vinod Nautiyal and his students.

Dr. Bernard Means, VMNH Research Associate and Director of the VCU Virtual Curation Laboratory, recently traveled to India to HNB Garhwal University in Sinagar (Garhwal), Uttarakhand State, India to further discussions of 3D artifact scanning and strengthen the relationship between the Virtual Curation Laboratory (VCL) and Dr. Vinod Nautiyal and his students.

Recently, while prepping some skeletons for the Archaeology’s reference collection, I came across a nearly intact skeleton of a hummingbird. As I examined this hummingbird skeleton, I wanted to compare it to another bird skeleton.

Local high-school students were recently treated to a remote presentation by world-class researcher Dr. William J. McShea of the Conservation Ecology Center in the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute of the National Zoological Park.

Stone tools from the Rudacil site are being washed and inventoried in the archaeology lab. This site is part of the Paleoindian Period Flint Run Archaeological Complex and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Megacopta cribraria (a.k.a. the Kudzu Bug; Fig. 1), a relative of the familiar, and more widespread, brown marmorated stink bug (Halyomorpha haly) is a relatively recent addition to the North American hemipteran (a group that includes stink bugs, aphids, planthoppers, and cicadas) fauna.

Hibernation is a kind of sleep that allows animals to live for months without eating or drinking. We often associate hibernation with mammals such as groundhogs and bears, but other animals are hibernators, too.

Last week was a busy one for Dr. Elizabeth Moore, Curator of Archaeology at VMNH. Dr. Moore met with met with a variety of people working in archaeology and historic preservation including students and faculty from VCU, staff at the Department of Historic Resources, and professional and avocational archaeologists from the Archaeological Society of Virginia.

Our address is 21 Starling Avenue in Martinsville, Virginia. We do a lot, and a lot of good, down here in the south-central area of the Commonwealth. But... our mission says we are to interpret Virginia’s natural heritage for all citizens. That’s a big task – and we’re getting there!

Museums are good at preserving the record of the past, and using the knowledge gained from our specimens and artifacts to plot new roads to the future. Information gleaned from archaeological records hundreds of years ago assists wildlife management experts restore natural communities as they were prior to European contact.